This is not polling -- it is a political agenda uses polling as a weapon.

Why Republicans?

Why not poll blacks and ascertain how THEY feel about interracial marriage? Or, better yet, ask black men how they feel about black women marrying white men? Do you think there is anything in that last question that might produce "racist" results? You bet there would be!

Why weren't white voters likely to vote Democrat also polled?

If the results DO show that a certain segment of the population is racist, what has that to do with Obama? Did he marry a white woman? Have we all been misinformed on that last point?

So, half of Republican voters think he is a Muslim. What does that prove -- other than half think he is a Muslim? Do other political and ethnic groups feel the same or different? For all we know, 90% of black voters think Obama is a Muslim.

Did they indicate they would vote against a Muslim? For a Muslim? What's the point?

And the business on evolution -- haven't we moved on in this country from "Inherit the Wind?" My guess is a poll of Republican voters would show that 90% of them believe that pollsters are jerks.

How many blacks were polled for their attitude on the literal accuracy of the Bible? If they polled just as high on opposing evolution as the whites, can we draw the negative implications about Negroes that this column so obviously wants us to draw against Republicans?

There are regional differences on race and religion in America. And, in another startling piece of date, grass was proven in a "major university study" to frequently be green. Except when it was not.

The voters "visceral dislike" of "first biracial president" (who is, remember, married to a BLACK WOMAN) might just have something to do with an 8.3 % jobless rate, a weasel-like stand on abortion and gay marriage, a Rube Goldberg health plan, the largest deficit in world history, two prolonged foreign wars (which he had promised to end) and several years of empty-suitism in the Executive Mansion.

I suspect that a majority of Democratic voters would say it is peachy-keen to kill an infant in utero. So, I guess what the pollsters might reveal is that we can divide the electorate in killer and racists. So much for polling.

The TE article tried to connect anti-Obama feeling with biracial marriage -- which poll it highlighted indicated a large portion of the southern population opposed. I find that irrelevant to Obama's situation as he is not in a biracial marriage -- Michelle Obama is a black woman. TE was reaching.

I think the reason for my observation is quite evident fto anyone who carefully read the original article.

Dude, Obama is the child of a inter-racial relationship. That is the connection TE is making. Thought this was obvious to everybody.

Obama's own marriage is not the point.

Take you own advice and read the article.

"What is driving these voters' visceral dislike of our biracial president, the child of a mixed marriage between a white woman and a black African?"

Bi-racial means "of two races" like Obama, not Obama's marital situation. If there was any doubt, it is even clarified in the sentence itself. The irrelevance (not reason) of your observation on Obama's marriage is quite evident to everybody, hence the earlier question.

PPP can fairly or unfairly single out anything it wishes, coz it's irrelevant. A pollster affiliated to a political party is a contradiction in terms. Any result of any of their surveys shouldn't be taken even with a ton of salt: they're all predetermined propaganda. Note that affiliation to ANY party leads to bias, just the particular bias is different.

That said, people are entitled to their views, aren't they? Crowds of academia Marxists for instance think the society should be remade along the collectivist ideology lines, and those of them like the prominent 'educationalist' and presidential buddy Bill Ayers think that shooting judges and blasting federal buildings is OK for achieving this goal.

And you happily send your children to them to get indoctri... sorry, educated.

The presumption that any views of Southerners, country hillbillies, white trash... eh, teabaggers, of course... - what other names the big champions of Liberté, égalité, fraternité give to their fellow countrymen they despise? - are garbage is just another sign of ungrounded aloofness, so characteristic for the 'progressive' crowd.

As someone born in South Carolina I can speak to this topic. I would argue that we know black people better than people outside of the deep south. This is because when we were young (I am 50) we lived in close proximity to one another. When I was a kid, more than 50% of people in South Carolina were black. Of course my parents sent me to the all white private school because the local public school was 100% black. Contrast that environment with, say, Vermont where they had never even seen a black person. Before that our parents and grandparents grew up in a different time and told those stories to us. The last lynching that I know of in South Carolina was around 1940. When my parents were children there were signs at the side of town warning black people not to go there or they would be run out. And then go back to my grandparent's generation and their grandparents were civil war veterans. So you can connect the timeline here and see that we are really the only people to have witnessed or have heard of the Jim Crow laws and before that slavery. Actual former slaves lived on the farm where my grandfather grew up. Of course it would affect our thinking. And those of you in the diaspora of the South would be puzzled when polling yields results like that because you have no experience with this. You can't simply stamp out the history of this region. History is part of what defines the South.

So you're arguing that White Southerners "know" Black people better because they ... enslaved them and got rich off their stolen labor? And somehow this leads to it being okay to oppose interracial marriage, instead of racist bollocks? The fact you are forced to work hard and pay money to avoid Black people doesn't somehow excuse harboring an irrational hatred for our Commander in Chief based on nothing more than his parentage.

The history of the South may be part of what defines it, but it is also why the rest of the nation is deeply ashamed of the South. There is nothing honorable about racism, and nothing to be glorified in a past full of systematic violence, dehumanization and terrorism.

What oracle did you consult to learn that "the rest of the nation is deeply ashamed of the South?" He might want to go to Delphi and get his license renewed.

There are roughly 100,000,000 people in the South -- what basis is there to think they are any less decent than you or me?

As for those whites who "enslaved them [blacks] and got rich off their stolen labor," do you mean to include the million or more Cuban immigrants in Florida? The million or so Jews in Florida? The countless millions of Hispanics who are flourishing in the South? The many millions of corporate employees who were relocated from the North to places like Chapel Hill? The millions of snowbirds from Canada and the Upper Midwest?

As for violence, try Detroit after dark. Or Camden. Or Cleveland. Or Philadelphia. Or Gary. Or Newark. Or a few dozen other burned-out northern inner cities.

Personally, I could care less about interracial marriage and would be delighted to attend the wedding of a little green man from Mars, sex unspecified, to a daughter of the DAR if I knew there would be an open bar.

Mr. Obama is the Calvin Coolidge, the William Howard Taft of our time. A decent man who has accomplished little of note. People don't, in my opinion, dislike him because his parents were biracial. In fact, most people don't seem to dislike him --- they just don't think he's good at what he does.

Next time you are offended by racial prejudice, try to restrain from lumping tens of millions of decent people into an ethnic stereotype. ("Those southerners -- they all look alike. Can't trust none of them!")

Got rich, have you ever been to the south? Slavery was a useless backward institution that brutalized black people and retarded the whites, before leading to a way that slaughtered the population and destroyed the country.

The South has always been poor, it was before the civil war from slavery, and after from reconstruction and redemption. It's only from finally overcoming, to some extent, those prejudices that parts of the South have started to become prosperous. Segregation immiserates both sides, and a bias against interracial marriage is not just a civil rights issue for African Americans. Racism is idiotic, not calculating.

Well, let's see -- the first time I was in the South was a half-century ago when I toured it with five other students. I did business there for decades and routinely visited places like Atlanta and Charleston. Also, we vacationed there many times.

Slavery was a terrible institution -- so was the Inquisition. Like the late lamented Clementine, both are lost and gone forever. It is bootless to ascribe problems in the 21st century to a war from the century before last.

Much of the South is poor. Have you ever been to upstate New York? Inland Maine? Small towns on the Plains? There is a great deal of the underclass -- it doesn't all speak with a southern accent.

The idea that there is a biological disparity among members of homo sapiens sapiens has long be exploded. There may be a few troglodytes who still believe this but, then, there are a few who believe the earth is flat and that giraffes got long necks by constantly stretching them to reach trees.

Racism, however, is more than a belief in inferior humans. There is, in my experience, more racism in the black than white communit. I recently had a high-school student tell my class "My family hates white people." This is far from the first time I've encountered racial bias on the part of blacks.

I have many friends, including one in the very, very highest level of state government, who are liberal to their very core. They wear their lack of racism like a badge which they are happy to display on the least provocation. EVERY ONE of them chooses to live in an all-white neighborhood. NO exceptions.

I don't blame them. The traditional black neighborhoods in our metropolitan area are dangerous and the schools there are abyssmal. In this sense, what appears to be a "racist" decision to avoid black people on a day-to-day basis is merely looking out for their families.

Racism is not, pardon me for saying so, the simple "We're good/They're bad" dichotomy you seem to prefer. Racism is more a matter of class than color. Those with money, regardless of their "liberal" politics, shun the lower classes and those classes are typically minority. Then, they preach to the rest of us about equality. I listen to my friends and smile inside.

It takes very little moral investment to be "against" racism. It is about as controversial as being against murder. It takes, however, a great deal of thought to see how racisim is really about class and that this classism is, in fact, usually rooted in a realistic assessment of self-interest. (Otherwise, my liberal friends would be snapping up cheap property in black neighborhoods.)

"The South has always been poor, it was before the civil war from slavery, and after from reconstruction and redemption."

I feel its worth noting that the South had more millionaires per capita than any other area on the planet at one point during its history. I realize this doesn't mean everyone there was rich but still.

That's why you see the Confederate Battle Flag, rather than the flag of the Confederate States of America. It's the flag of the people who got sent off to be butchered, not that of the people who sent them there.

If there every was a rich man's war and a poor man's fight. I don't know why the North never followed through on its promise about Jefferson Davis. When you see the stars and bars lined up in front of the old tombstones, that is something aside from racism.

Mississippi and Alabama wouldnt be voting for a democrat even if its a white male from Arkansas. Get over it; Not voting republican because its the party of southern racist rednecks is like not voting democrat because its the party of black muslim Indonesians.

"What is driving these voters' visceral dislike of our biracial president...?"
It's your peers elsewhere in the media-entertainment-industry complex.
Harmony and cooperation in good faith are hardly conucive to the business imperatives of a 24 hour news cycle. In communism the media lied to citzens by asserting that everything is just great or at least OK. In capitalism the media deceives by making everything look just awful. Do they hate this guy any more than they hated WJ "Bubba" Clinton?
As far as the bizarre faith in a foreign and muslim Barry O., I'm quite certain that neither of these myths are true. Nevertheless the public's doubts are not entirely misplaced. The President shares one thing with almost all his competition - and any politician for that matter. They're all pretty much phonies, so it's pretty hard to tell what's genuine and hiding behind the poll-tested facades.
That profession is hardly conducive to wearing your heart on your sleeve. And god forbid, whether as a result of difficult reflection after new evidence or experience, if you ever change your mind and your conscience dictates a new direction, you will forever be branded an indecisive "flip-flopper." As if the public is too dim to tell who the real wet fingers in the wind are.

Absolutely. Not that they liked Clinton, of course. And he gave them openings by his personal character failings -- openings that they exploited with glee.

But Obama does not show any signs of those same flaws. (And if he had ever shown the least sign of womanizing, you can bet that they would be all over him in an instant!) In fact, I would not be surprised if one of the (many) things that they hate about him is that his personal life looks exactly like what they believe everyone's should be (even if their's, and their champions', frequently aren't).

Hogwash - It is very much a matter of POST-judice. I have known many Southerners and have had close friends and loves from the deep South. I regularly hear from them what the folks back home are thinking and saying. But that kind of information is hardly necessary; one need only read the polls. Are you trying to flim-flam people who read the Economist ?

How many high schools in Mississippi and Alabama haven't yet managed to have an integrated senior prom ?

You aren't attacking a belief, you're attacking an entire region. It is precisely because racism is so terrible that it is despicable to attach it as a label to an entire population. It's as wrong as Gingrich's dog-whistle statements.

There are those who are racist in the south, and there are those who ain't, and there are a lot of southerners who are black. Think about that before you insult their home.

Race is a problem throughout America. Pretending that it only comes spoken with a southern accent isn't progressivism, it's a cheap way to distract from the problems of your own areas. The South had a horrible experience through Reconstruction, Redemption, and Massive Resistance, but at least it forced us take a long hard look in the mirror. The rest of the country never did the same.

Actually, the most segregated state in the Union is California. Of course, everybody here has the most liberal regard for the people on the outside of their gated community.

People here believe in evolution... and thetons, and acupuncture, and chi, and biodynamic agriculture. God just beat this part of the country with a different stupid stick.

If you want to know the difference between the South and those blue states, those states are like the family that eats silently at the dinner table, no one says anything, and they all secretly hate each other. In the South, people run their mouth off instead of bottling up their prejudices under an affectation of politically correct liberalism.

Because of people like Fox Brown or George Wallace it's always easy to cast racism as a southern phenomenon. There's no talk about how California passed a prop expressly allowing racial discrimination in housing, and then right after you got the Rodney King riots. I've noticed living in N Berkeley, Oakland might as well be a different country. That wasn't true in Richmond. And I have no sympathy for the "Were not prejudiced, not like those dumb crackers" sentiment.

As for Republicans, in Virginia I would say that the fight over segregation ended when the state elected its first Republican governor after Reconstruction, and he sent his daughter to an integrated public school. What you say doesn't matter, it's what you do.

Ah, but is the social distance between Berkeley and Oakland based on race? Or is it more based on class? I wouldn't be surprised if class (whether of blacks in Oakland or of crackers in the South) is the more motivating prejudice in Berkeley.

Some people live in the real world and observe it, instead of reading blogs. You might try it too instead of replying to every other comment on economist blogs.
publius50 is completely correct. I lived in the bluest and the reddest states, and racism does not go away, it just hides. Remember that fella who just happened to be a black Harvard professor trying to get into his house back in 2009? It was that nice little good neighbor, a white lady who called the cops.

It's according to an Index of Dissimilarity. I couldn't find the data by state, but the most segregated urban areas are all in the north. In order, worst on down: Detroit, Milwaukee, New York, Newark, Chicago, Philadelphia. Then it's a southern city, well, Miami that is.

If you're asking me where I got it from, my moms is an urban geographer who did her thesis on racial segregation patterns in Portland. Always listen to your mom, I guess I can't cite that on a paper, but still. Love ya ma.

Also, the south is a big thing to talk about. I've lived in Raleigh-Durham, Richmond, and Arlington. That's different. I've never actually been to either Mississippi or Alabama.

I do remember catching the Amtrak out a' SC and looking up to find that I was the only white person sitting on that side of the station. The population of people waiting for the train was in high contrast. Of course, our side was the one with the TV and the white people looked rather glum about that.

It's interesting actually, I had this incredible urge to get up and move. I didn't, but you could just feel the desire to segregate yourself. You could see everyone, white or black, just looking at you, and wondering what you were doing. Segregation is less about out-and-out racism than people think, it's something else.

You guys are confusing segregation (class, race, ideology) and the propensity to vote/choose a candidate and so going off on a tangent.

Nobody complained about polling for attitudes towards Mormons in the GOP primaries to explain votes for Romney and votes against him, no one brought up the issue of whether Mormons and Christians leave segregated lives in Utah or Massachusetts. The polling was done to explain the voting behavior in a particular region. Which Presidential candidate has done or said anything to make that difference matter? It is as irrelevant to candidacy as genetics.

Yet why is this polling an issue? Who is getting defensive about the results and why?

In racial segregation, it is not the segregation (or not) in an area that matters, it is whether members one race is likely to vote for a candidate of another race regardless of whether they interact with members of such race on a daily basis or not. A white in one area can deal with hispanics/blacks all day long but still believe they should remain separate in marriages and that they do not want a President from those races even if qualified. A white in another area may have never interacted with a particular race but may have no problem voting for that person if a qualified person came along and be race-blind.

The question is whether racial bigotry (or religious bigotry) plays a part in candidate selection because race/religion by itself is not a reasonable criterion for a candidate.

So are the people in NYC in those apparently segregated (presumably more correlated with class) lifestyle less or more likely to vote for a mixed-race candidate compared to an average person in Alabama or Mississippi who interacts more with other races? That is the point.

Yes, states are somewhat segregated in terms of ideologies but the political ideology IS relevant to voting for a President unlike race/religion.

This would be a non-issue if people didn't react to polls like this so defensively. It makes it a bigger issue than it is.

Having lived in both Berkeley and Oakland for a half-dozen years each, I'd say that the social distance is definitely class-based.

Although the correlation between class and race is significant, I don't think it's causative. In both cities you see one or more of just about every ethnicity you could imagine while you're out and about. Our neighborhood in Oakland didn't even have an ethnic majority (the plurality was Asian).

But the folks up on the hills did generally shop and socialize with different people than those in the flatlands from those in the "economically disadvantaged" areas.

"What is driving these voters' visceral dislike of our biracial president, the child of a mixed marriage between a white woman and a black African? What makes them uncomfortable and angry about the direction the country is heading?"
I blame Republicans in Congress. We have a centrist president who passed a healthcare reform bill based on a Republican-inspired idea for reform from the 1990's. And how did the GOP react? They whipped the base into a frenzy, labeled Obama a Kenyan socialist, and worked to sabotage every piece of legislation and appointee simply to deny the appearance of bipartisanship. The GOP leadership jumped, and the base followed.

Eh, I don't buy the "But the GOP supported this in the 90s!" Yes, but that's like saying "But Teddy Roosevlet was a Republican, and he wanted universal healthcare!". Politics change, times change, etc.

Also, that was more the position of policy wonks than actual voters. I do wonder if it had actually passed if Americans would have been okay with the idea that the government can make you buy a product. On the other hand, the GOP didn't care about spending when their guy, Bush, was doing it, just as the Democrats are much more quiet on civil liberties when it is their guy doing the violating. Politics as a team sport makes fools of all partisans.

Eh, I don't buy the "But the GOP supported this in the 90s!" Yes, but that's like saying "But Teddy Roosevlet was a Republican, and he wanted universal healthcare!". Politics change, times change, etc.

If Teddy R. were seeking office instead of having been out of it for 100 years, and had supported/enacted the exact health care plan that he decried as "socialism" a few years later, and were alive instead of dead, then yeah, those arguments would look a lot alike.

Also, I feel like Obama isn't a centrist. Oh, he's a centrist in a historical sense: A big stimulus after an economic crises, something done about climate change, etc. However, the center has shifted: Once, Nixon imposed wage and price controls, rationed gas, and declared we are all Keynesians. That makes him downright leftwing in our current climate.

I think the stimulus creating/saving (and that was a fun rhetorical slight of hand) 3 million jobs for 1 trillion dollars, or about $333,333.33 per job really hurt the argument for a stimulus. It empowered the people who had never been okay with Keynseian stimulus in the first place. And I do think it is a fair question to those who support stimulus programs why it costs so much per job, and where exactly all the money is going to. Furthermore, it is an interesting question for many why shovel-ready was not very shovel ready (it would appear one factor is strapped state budgets, the regulatory state may also play a role).

I mean, look at Europe: The level and depth of austerity needed is shaking any number of political articles of faith. The center is shifting there too. What appears to be a driving force is a lack of government money, and high taxes just don't seem to be doing it anymore. Britain's 50 percent rate is more of a symbol than an effective revenue raiser, as articles in the Economist have addressed. Hell, even in the U.S., when people say, "Repeal the Bush tax cuts" it seems that the only change really desired is to raise the top rate from 35 to 39 percent, not to target the myriad of deductions that benefit the rich such as the child tax credit and home mortgage deduction but are also wildly popular and beneficial to the middle class.

I see where you are coming from. But wouldn't an educated guess on the level of racism in certain communities shed some light on their stand point on other issues? Question like drug laws, immigration and social welfare could be viewed in a different light, if I am correct in assuming that e.g. blacks in these states are more likely to be poor?

Ms Cottle unconsciously answers her own question when she asks whether or not the questions raised by this poll(mixed race marriage and whether or not President Obama is a Muslim) are politically relevant. The point of the poll is that these issues ARE NOT politically relevant and have not been for years.

Just how progressive do you expect these people to be when the item on the table is not mixed race marriage but gay marriage and civil unions?

The South has plenty of wonderful things about it. Its official history on racial and sexual bigotry though, is something that everyone is aware of, everyone is embarrassed about, and everyone takes no action on. Its the elephant in the room, and the room is the whole country, not just the South btw.

Also, Tennessee and the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina both have the best bar-b-que in the world.

I don't find the polling terribly interesting, but it's dishonest to imagine a world where these questions aren't asked. Her complaining is trying.

We live in a world where people are asked to spend the rest of their lives explaining an error they made in their youth. Nobody asks a person how their struggle with dependence is going when they've never had an issue. Family names can result in the need to explain the actions of another. A company's name can result in heightened vigilance in regards to past mistakes. Catholics are polled on their views of the clergy. Jews are polled on Israel. Mormons are polled on polygamy. Questions about Muslim, Wright, and birth are still polled in regards to Obama.

Life's unfair, and if Cottle can't deal with that she's in the wrong business.

As for whether or not inter-racial marriage is relevant today... I didn't think birth control was, but these things die hard. The best thing to do is keep answering the questions until the questioners find the answers are too boring to merit the asking.

"The salient point here, obviously, is that Vermont and Maine are 95% white and 1% black."

This just goes to show you the arbitrariness of statelines. Alabama and Mississippi are "extremely segregated," yet M.S. didn't even notice that Vermont and Maine are basically segregated enclaves of White people at the state-level.

Yes, I do find it interesting that the places where you are more likely to see and interact with people of other races on a day to day basis are considered more "segregated".

Also, doesn't this ring of the Boston Busing thing from the early 70s? The North has always taken pride in its more racially "enlightened" view versus the South, but when rubber meets the road and whites and blacks are actually put in school together, those places can demonstrate just as horrifying racism.

It isn't just random/arbitrary and it isn't by design. The reason there isn't a large population of blacks in Maine or Vermont is because those states don't have a significant history of importing African slaves to work on their plantations like Alabama and Mississippi. Now the descendants of those slaves have laid down roots in those states, and the descendants of the slave owners continue to live in segregated enclaves, and by and large retain racist attitudes. Stop trying to turn things around here: the story is the headline is the story. There's not a coherent counterpoint to be made.

Publius, several posts here are stark evidence to inability of the progressive commissariat (or was it commentariat?) to perceive jokes and irony even on elementary level.
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It takes several progressives to mull over a single joke together and then - if they're lucky - to cry out Eureka!

I agree with Ms. Cottle. I don't really know why this is important. These are our neighbors and countryfolk same as Mormons and Mammon-worshippers. Some of us are racists, some of us are idiots, some of us are thieves, lazy, self-righteous, self-centered and sanctimonious. Darn near all of us are at least one of the above. Maybe future countries will want to have a draft?

Thank you for pointing out that the poll was done by a Democratic pollster.

The Pew polls indicates that the vast majority of interracial marriages occur between whites and Hispanics. If you look at white/black marriage, Alabama is 7th in the country. Mississippi is 29th. Both have a higher percentage of white/black marriage than California or New York.

I don't doubt that there's lots of racial prejudice in the South but I just had to call you out on your fact cherry-picking.

Certainly in California, white-asian marriages are by far the most common. As for Hispanics with non-Hispanics, it's a bit problematic, given that there are a lot of people with Hispanic names whose families were here long before California joined the US. They are about as thoroughly assimilated as people named Johnson or Schmidt or O'Brian - -which is to say totally.

The important ratio, obviously, is the ratio of size of black population to rate of black-white interracial marriage. On that scale, both Alabama and Mississippi rate incredibly low, and Maine rates very high. New York and California have fewer black-white marriages than Alabama and Mississippi solely because they have fewer black people.

The reason it's important to consider "interracial marriage" is precisely that the relevant racial minority in many states isn't blacks but a different group. Oklahoma, Texas and Alaska have pretty high rates of interracial marriage (in the mid-teens), which shows you that prejudice against mixing races with American Indians and Hispanics in those states isn't as strong as prejudice against mixing races with blacks is in Mississippi.

Oh, and incidentally, this is why the most striking example of stark black-white racial segregation I saw in the whole list was the District of Columbia. You need to compare the rate of black-white intermarriage to the black proportion of the population.

But why do you need to do that? Or why during a presidential election? None of the candidates have offered to do anything about miscegenation, including the one who is more prescriptive about marriage than any presidential candidate I can recall and most aunts.

It just feels like the only reason this would be topical is for the purpose of questioning the legitimacy of the voters and the point in an election is for the voters to decide the legitimacy of the candidates.

1. A poll reported the answers to a simple question on for/againt inter-racial marriage (not black/white or white/hispanic).

As a side note, while it is emphasized as by a Democratic pollster, that fact by itself doesn't imply invalidity of the result of this simple poll (implying otherwise would be a circumstantial ad hominem fallacy). One may question the motivation for the poll, but it doesn't invalidate what it measured unless one can point to a flaw in the polling method. No such claims have been made.

2. A right-leaning blogger questions the validity of the poll to elections and asks if such a poll would have been conducted in other states.

The fact that he is right-leaning has no relevance to the question about the validity, of course. But when one uses circumstantial ad hominem on one side, it would apply to the other side as well. So let us assume that who did the polling or question has nothing to do with the validity of that poll result or the challenge to it.

3. It is a reasonable assumption that when people answer a question about inter-racial marriages, they have the dominant racial demographics of their environment in mind.

If a region has mostly blacks and whites, the answer would likely be based on the image of a marriage between a black and a white. If a region has mostly hispanics and whites, the answer would likely be based on the image of a marriage between a white and a hispanic, etc. This assumption can be questioned, of course.

In other words, the racial demographics of these Southern states are such that it is unlikely that their answers to the question between "black and white" and just "inter-racial" are unlikely to be significantly different regardless of whether the results are in favor or not (just as the results may be between "hispanic and white" and "inter-racial" may be in New Mexico, Arizona or even California). I am not sure anyone is making a contrary assertion.

4. The article attempts to answer the challenge why such a question would not have been asked in other states and answer why the results of this poll IS relevant to the elections in these Southern states.

4a. The article says this is relevant because Obama is the child of an inter-racial marriage and in particular a black and white marriage.

So if the poll had asked the question as marriage between black and white in these states, it is unlikely the results would have been statistically significantly different. It is probably a sign of the growth of political correctness and the increase of other races in a visual manner that the question was simply phrased as inter-racial.

So it poses the reasonable hypothesis that perhaps the attitudes of a population with a dominant black and white population that is significantly against inter-racial marriage may have their beliefs colored by the genetics of Obama.

On the other hand, if Obama was a mixed white-Japanese and there were very few Japanese (or Asians) in these states, one could perhaps make the claim that the poll answers MAY NOT necessarily be indicative of its relevance because the answers were based on an animosity in the current context of black and whites in that area which may or may not apply to their views towards other inter-racial marriages. But this is not the case.

4b. To answer whether such a question would not have been asked in other states, there are two arguments from the article. One, in the polls towards marriages between blacks and whites, we have answers from the USA Gallup poll.

The thesis is - "A poll of Southern Republicans is sampling the most anti-interracial-marriage political group in the most anti-interracial-marriage region of the country".

To be accurate and consistent with the USA/Gallup poll, it can be rephrased as

"A poll of Southern Republicans is sampling the most anti-black/white-marriage political group in the most anti-black/white-marriage region of the country".

With that restatement, it is consistent in its conclusions. None of the obfuscating objections here are relevant to this argument.

Next, there is the question of targeting Alabama and Mississippi for actual rate of inter-racial marriages based on the Pew survey.

If you allow for the reasonable assumption that the distribution of inter-racial marriages is influenced by the racial distribution in the region, a region with more black and whites with a much smaller hispanic population is going to have more black/white marriages than white/hispanic within the actual marriages than a region with more whites and hispanics and much smaller black population and vice versa. But that difference doesn't say anything about the attitudes towards inter-racial marriages.

So Alabama being 7th IS the meaningless and cherry-picked number. The correct ranking would be by number of marriages normalized by a diversity measure. I suspect Alabama and Mississippi would come low in such a normalized ranking as well.

That is a good question. And I suspect the reason for a left-leaning pollster is primarily what you suggest.

However, there is a very good reason for having the context of any election made transparent.

Politicians, on either side, have the habit of "divining a mandate" from every election, every win, every poll. Almost always this is a self-serving false narrative.

Identifying these contexts weaken such false narratives if and when they should arise.

It has been suggested even in right-leaning circles that the overwhelming mandate in many of the elections so far is anti-Obama, not necessarily the platform of the candidates (or even despite the unpopular platform points of the candidates). This just sets the context for such anti-Obama feelings - whether it be racial, religious or other ideological motivations.

It's an attempt to get around respondents' defenses and get an unguarded answer about their animosity towards other races. It's a less common question than "do you dislike X racial group" and people are less likely to have developed a verbal barrier against it.

It's reasonable to question the legitimacy of voters (not "the voters") who would vote for someone because of race, and reasonable to expect it to be a factor in elections that involve someone who isn't white. I guess in the future it will be a factor in elections that involve someone who is human, since the entire country has now had a taste of racial diversity in elections.

The more meaningful stat would be white-black marriage as a percentage of potential white-black pairs. But that's not what you used. You cited the incidence of all interracial marriages as proof of Southern prejudice against blacks.

Yes, prejudice against Hispanics in New Mexico probably isn't as strong as prejudice against blacks in Mississippi. That's meaningless. Prejudice against blacks in New Mexico is very likely stronger than against Hispanics in Mississippi. There's just generally less prejudice against Hispanics than blacks, at least when it comes to marriage.

On second thought even white-black marriage as a percentage of potential white-black pairs might not even be a good measure. White-Asian marriage is on the decline as the Asian-American population increases.

President Obama, by his very existence, proves good things come of "miscegenation". It is a relevant political issue in the same way public attitudes towards Mormonism is a relevant political issue. No one was arguing we shouldn't be talking about that when M.S. blogged about it.

No one is arguing that racists shouldn't be allowed to vote. We are arguing that when Obama looses the South again all it says about his mandate is that a significant portion of Southern voters are racists. Just as Southern Republicans are free to be racists, the rest of the country is free to point out how appalling we find their beliefs. Both are political positions. It isn't delegitimizing them: they've already done that to themselves when they chose to care more about someone's skin color than what he has done for their country.

If you don't want people to run articles about how racist Southern Republicans are, figure out a way to convince them not to be racist.

"The important ratio, obviously, is the ratio of size of black population to rate of black-white interracial marriage."

This ratio probably suggests something, but I don't think it can be used as a blunt proxy to represent the white population's racial progressiveness. A low rate of interracial marriage could signal the preference of minorities to marry each other rather than to marry whites; it need not only indicate miscegenation anxiety on the part of whites. In states with significant minority populations, like Alabama and Mississippi, the pool of prospective partners from the same racial group will be large, thereby facilitating this preference (if it exists). A minority living in Maine or Vermont would almost by necessity have to include a significant number of whites in the the pool of prospective partners, even if they might prefer otherwise.

Again, this is all a hypothetical alternative explanation. My point is that statistics alone don't tell the story, and we should guard against overly reductive interpretations.